“The Reformed Episcopalian at the Lord’s Table” is the third in a series
of eight sermons that the Right Rev. Charles Edward Cheney preached on the
beliefs of the Reformed Episcopal Church at Christ Church, Chicago. Cheney was
the Bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church’s Synod of Chicago and was one of
the founders of the Reformed Episcopal Church. He was consecrated Bishop by
George David Cummins on December 14, 1873. Cheney would succeed Cummins as the
Presiding Bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church upon Cummins’ untimely death
in 1876 and would serve in that capacity from 1876-1877 and 1877-1889. The
Reformed Episcopal Publications Society would publish the sermon series in book
form with the title What Do Reformed Episcopalians Believe? Eight Sermons preached in Christ Church, Chicago in 1888. The sermon series provides insight
into what the founders of the Reformed Episcopal Church believed and taught, as
opposed to what the Reformed Episcopal Church’s present day leaders believe and
teach.
“And as they were
eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and gave it to the disciples, and
said. Take, eat ; this is My body. And He took the cup,and gave thanks,
and gave it to them, saying. Drink ye all of it: for this is My blood of the
New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission
of sins.” St.
Matt, xxvi : 26-28.
No visible institution of Christianity, so impresses the
mind and the imagination, as the supper of the Lord. Its hoary age makes it
venerable. It antedates the Christian Church itself.
“Soldiers," cried Napoleon, to his army in Egypt, “behold
the Pyramids! Forty centuries are
looking down upon you.”
Yet the passover, out of which the communion sprang, the
passover which prefigured the sacrifice of Jesus, as the supper of the Lord
recalls it to memory, belongs to the age when the Pyramids were built. The communicant
is looked down upon by the witness of four thousand years. And when the
Pyramids shall crumble, the Lord's supper shall remain. For, “as oft as ye do
eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show forth the Lord's death until He come.”
Little wonder if superstition has seized upon so venerable
an ordinance, and used it as a potent weapon to subvert the freedom of God's
children. It is the duty of every Reformed Episcopalian, as of every Christian,
to know the exact nature of so conspicuous and solemn an institution of Christ.
Let us attempt that duty to-day, with prayer for the Spirit's guidance.
I. What is the
Scriptural and Evangelical View of the Holy Communion?
It would seem as if the New Testament had left us without
excuse if we blunder as to the true answer to this inquiry. For doubt and
controversy generally arise in regard to things concerning whose early origin
history has left us in the dark.
The windowless “round towers” upon the rocky coast of
Ireland, have given rise to whole volumes of controversial literature.
Antiquarians and scholars have debated with each other whether they were places
of religious' worship, or fortresses for defence. But the discussion carried on
for centuries, is not ended yet. For history contains no line or word to tell the
story of their erection.
But the record of the institution of the Lord's supper has
been given in the Bible so fully, so clearly, and with such repetition, that
error would seem impossible and debate unnecessary. We have four distinct and
separate accounts, differing from each other in regard to no material fact.
Three out of the four evangelists, viz., St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke,
have told the story nearly in the same words. It would seem as though these
three accounts were sufficient. But when the apostle Paul finds the Church at
Corinth perverting this sacrament from its holy purpose, he gives to that
Christian community a fourth narrative of the first origin of the Lord's Supper,
which he declares he had received by direct inspiration from the Lord Himself.
1 Cor. xi: 23.
Now the first thing which attracts the attention of the
Reformed Episcopalian who studies this fourfold record, is the simplicity of the Lord's supper.
Our foreign dispatches tell us that it is not an unlikely
event, that the imperial crown of Germany may at any time be set upon the head
of a child but five years old. How strangely out of place, upon such an infant
— just as simple and childlike by nature as the little one in your home — will
be the imperial robes, the glittering orders, the pompous splendors, and the
artificial dignity which surrounds a monarch!
Equally unnatural, in the light of the New Testament
accounts of the Lord's supper, seem to the Protestant Christian, the pomp and
ceremony with which the communion is sometimes celebrated. If the Lord Jesus
had tried to choose a method of establishing an institution in his Church,
which should be singularly plain, simple, and unencumbered by ritual, He could
hardly have selected a different way. That simplicity appears in the place selected for the last supper. No
splendid temple, no gorgeous sanctuary, no decorated shrine, witnessed the
first eucharist. It was the bare upper chamber of some Jewish house borrowed
for the occasion.
The same simplicity is revealed in the total want of any ritual details. Christ wrote
out no rubrics of direction how the Church was to perpetuate this feast. The
shelves of our ecclesiastical libraries are crowded with “manuals of devotion,”
for the use of communicants. They descend to minute directions as to postures,
and even how the bread should be taken in the hand, and the chalice lifted to
the lips. But Christ did not depart from the simplicity of the sweet yet solemn
rite, by even an allusion to these minor matters. Christians have quarrelled
whether their attitude around the Lord's table should be standing, as in the
Greek Church; sitting, as is the practice of Presbyterians; or kneeling, as
with Episcopalians. Yet no one of these postures is that of the apostles, for
they reclined on couches, as the old Oriental fashion was at feasts. “The
simplicity which is in Christ,” forbade attention to such details. The Reformed
Episcopalian kneels, simply because the whole question of attitude is plainly a
matter of indifference, in which every Church may exercise its choice.
Observe, too, how this simple and natural idea of the communion
is preserved in the symbols employed. Jesus might have chosen some striking,
unique, unprecedented emblems of His dying love. Instead of that, He takes the
bread and the wine — both of which the Jews used in keeping the passover, and
which were therefore right before Him.
He seemed to say, “I make the simplest and most natural act
of your daily life a blessed and sacred thing. I hallow with the remembrance of
My love to you, even your partaking of food and drink.” It was anticipating St.
Paul's language: “Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory
of God.” When St. Paul rebukes the Corinthian Church for its failure to discern
the real purpose of this sacrament, he says, “Wherefore brethren, when ye come
together to eat, tarry one for another.” How clear it makes it that the Lord's
supper was a simple meal in memory of Christ. Not a word even to indicate that
the presence of a minister was necessary to the due celebration of the rite!
The fourfold history of the institution of this sacrament,
leads the Reformed Episcopalian, in perfect accord with other evangelical
believers, to regard the Lord's supper as a special memorial of Christ's atoning death.
In one of our public parks a statue stands, to keep in
memory for all generations a great statesman whom it represents in marble. That
commemoration is the one central idea with which it was erected. It doubtless
serves other purposes as well. The great pleasure ground is ornamented by its
presence. It bears witness to the liberality of the rich, and the self-denying
patriotism of the poor. It forms a bond of union between the multitude of
contributors to its erection. But these do not constitute the one great end
which its erection had in view. If these subsidiary purposes be crowded to the
front, and so kept before the public mind that the remembrance of the dead hero
shall be lost sight of, better that the sculptor never touched chisel to the
stone! A doctrine of the Lord's supper which belittles this memorial feature,
has lost the primal end for which the communion was instituted.
Our Lord used language
in His gift of this ordinance to His disciples, which can be only reasonably
and consistently explained on the basis of its being primarily a memorial rite.
He broke the bread, and gave it to them, with the words, “Take, eat, this is My
body.” Now, setting aside for the present, the Roman Catholic theory of a
miraculous change by which the bread was altered in its substance into the
literal body of Christ, what could He have meant by words like these? Precisely
what a father would mean, who, when about to cross the sea, gives his picture
to his children, and says, “This is myself.” He does not mean that the portrait
is actually his own personal being, but that it represents it And the only value of such a representation is that
it helps the memory to recall him. So, too, He speaks of the wine, “He took the
cup, and when He had given thanks, He said, This is My blood of the New
Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” The moment that
you fall short of the Popish theory of a transubstantiation of the wine, you
must of necessity understand Christ to mean that the wine was a representation of that blood which He
was to shed for sinners. It was ever afterward to appeal to the memory of the believer.
Nor need we depend on a mere interpretation of His words in
giving the emblems. St, Luke distinctly states that Jesus told the disciples
what was the purpose of these symbols, and of the Christian's partaking of
them. “This do,” He said, “in remembrance of Me.” Besides, when St. Paul
received from Christ Himself the account which he gives in his first epistle to
the Corinthian believers, he also declares that the very words of Christ were
those which St. Luke has recorded. And as if to make it clear that it was a
ceremony to be perpetuated in the Church mainly as a memorial rite, St. Paul
tells us that Jesus followed the giving of the cup with this still more
explicit expression of His will, “This do ye, as oft as ye shall drink it, in remembrance
of Me.”
Observe, too, the appropriateness
of the emblems to bring out in conspicuous relief, the memory of Christ's
sacrifice. The bread of which they partook had been before that hour employed
by Christ as a type of His body. St. John vi: 35-58. But now it is broken. Each account mentions with
particularity this fact of the bread being thus treated in His hands. As if
Christ would have the fact of His blessed body being bruised and pierced, the
one prominent idea in the recollection of His people. In the City of Boston,
thousands daily pass a statue of Abraham Lincoln. But it represents him in the
act of taking the fetters from the limbs of a slave. It clearly seems to say
that those who put that striking figure there, were not merely anxious to have
posterity remember the great president, but remember him in that particular act
of his eventful life. So do the broken bread and the flowing wine touch the
memory of the Christian with the recollection of a Saviour in the act of giving
His life for sinners.
Thus, the Reformed Episcopalian finds no incomprehensible
“mystery” in the communion as a means of grace. He does not approach the Lord's
table with the feeling that it is some magic charm in which he is to find
spiritual help, as the Romanist expects to find it in touching a relic of the
saints, or the wood of “the true cross.” Its philosophy is as clear as the
noonday.
For what can rekindle in the heart the glow of love, like
the stirring of the memory? In days of war, your voluntary substitute took your
place in the ranks, and died upon the field of battle. Can you bring out from
the place in which you treasure it, the memento which he sent you when he lay
dying, and which is stained with his heart's blood, and yet feel no stirring of
your soul's deepest love?
But the Reformed Episcopalian does not forget that together
with this memorial idea of the communion, another great truth is coupled.
The Lord's supper is a visible Gospel. We cannot see these
emblems of the death of Jesus without their preaching to us eloquently and
powerfully the doctrine of His atonement. Why, then, do we not satisfy all that
this sacrament demands, when we have looked upon the consecrated symbols of His
dying love ? Why eat the bread ? Why drink the wine? Will not our love be
wakened by the sight of this pictorial representation of His suffering for us ?
We have no hesitation in answering. Our bodily life is itself an emblem of our
spiritual life. Precisely as we sustain our bodily existence, by partaking of
food and drink, so BY FAITH do we feed upon Christ. The Old Testament had
foreshadowed it, when the prophet, turning from the rites and ceremonies of the
Mosaic Law, cried from his watchtower of vision, “The just shall live by faith.”
Habak. ii: 4. Christ Himself echoed the same great truth, when long before the
night in which he was betrayed. He solemnly declared, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man,
and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.”
That He did not refer to the communion in these strongly
figurative words, is plain. He uttered them at least a year before He
instituted the Lord's supper. He spoke to an assemblage of Jews, who could by
no possibility know anything of this ordinance to be established in the future.
Moreover, when He discovered that they only saw in them a gross and earthly
meaning, and wondered how they were to eat His flesh and drink His blood, He
corrected their blunder. He told them that in His body He was to ascend to
heaven, and that under the figure of His body and blood, He had spoken of His
Spirit. “What and if ye shall behold the Son of man ascend up where He was
before? It is the Spirit which quickeneth. The flesh profiteth nothing. The
words that I speak unto you, they are Spirit and they are life.” “He that
believeth on Me hath everlasting life." John vi: 62, 63.
If any words could express more clearly than these, that
simple trust in Christ and His word, sustains the spiritual life, as eating and
drinking sustain the bodily life, it is difficult to imagine what those words
could be. What follows? Evidently enough, that when the Saviour established the
Lord's supper. He ordained this eating of the bread, this drinking of the wine,
to be a symbol of the faith by which we must receive Him into our souls, and
live spiritually upon Him.
It maybe added that the Reformed Episcopalian sees one other
great truth brought clearly before him in this symbolic rite. In thus entering
into fellowship with his suffering Lord, he also becomes a member of the vast
brotherhood, whatever be the name they bear, who partake of Christ by faith, “the
blessed company of all faithful people.” By trust in Christ, they " all
eat the same spiritual meat, and drink the same spiritual drink." They
symbolize and picture forth that loving fellowship by this visible gathering
around the same table, and exhibit their common love and common interest in
each other, by calling their memorial feast, “the communion.”
No wonder that basing his view of the Lord's supper upon the
teaching of the word of God alone, the Reformed Episcopalian opens wide his
arms to welcome to this sweet and precious feast, all who love his “Divine Lord
in sincerity and truth.”
II. What has the
Reformed Episcopalian Done to Rescue the Lord’s Supper from Unscriptural
Perversion?
William of Orange, the leader of Protestant faith and civil
liberty, against the Church of Rome and the tyranny of Spain, once placed his
young son as a hostage in the hands of Philip II, the Spanish king. When at
last restored to his father, the youth had been transformed. He had become a
Spaniard in national spirit, a tyrant in political principle, and a bigoted
Romanist in religion. Where lay the secret of so vast and complete a change?
Simply here. The Spanish teachers began
early. The Reformed Episcopalian who reads the history of the visible
Church of Christ, discovers a like amazing transformation in the sacrament of
the Lord's supper. He sees the simple, natural, logical truth that was embodied
in a sacred meal, taken in common by believers, to commemorate the death of
Christ, changed into an appalling mystery and gorgeous ceremonial. He sees the
bread no longer broken, but in the form of a wafer. He sees the wine, in bold
violation of the Saviour's last command, taken from the laity and reserved for
the clergy alone. He sees the table which bore witness to the primitive
principle of the communion as a solemn, commemorative feast, replaced by a altar,
on which a priest offers the consecrated elements as a sacrifice to God. He
sees the wafer lifted up like an idol, and the people bowing in prostrate
adoration as before God Himself. He sees the universal Church accepting for a
thousand years the doctrine that the priest by his consecrating act has
transmuted the bread and wine into the literal and actual body and blood of the
Redeemer. How came to pass so amazing a revolution? The answer is that the
enemy began early. There is no trace of such a ceremony or such a doctrine in
the New Testament. We read of “the breaking of bread, and prayer” in apostolic
history, and the epistles to the apostolic churches. We see the Christians
gather at the simple meal which calls to their memory their suffering Lord. But
that is all.
Yet, no sooner do we leave inspired teaching, and open the
pages of the writers known as the “early fathers,” than the perversion of the
Lord's supper begins to appear. The good seed sown by the Son of Man was not
yet grown, when the tares sprang up also.
No heresy of the Roman Church so directly led to the
Reformation, as that of transubstantiation — the doctrine that what had been up
to their consecration, bread and wine, became by miraculous change the actual
flesh and blood of the Redeemer. Yet, so deeply rooted was this monstrous
theory, that even Luther could not fully rid his own mind of its remnants.
Rejecting transubstantiation, he tried to reconcile bis loyalty to God's word
with what he called “consubstantiation” — the notion that while the bread and
wine did not lose their nature, and were still bread and wine after consecration,
yet in union with them was the body and blood of Christ.
But the reformers of the Church of England, on this point
gave no uncertain sound. They may have entertained false theories in regard to
baptism, but they did not find on that field the battle which they were to
fight. The whole struggle of the English reformation raged about the supper of
the Lord. And here they drew broad and unmistakable the Scripture line between
Christ's truth and Rome's perversion. Let it ever be remembered that of the
many hundreds who died amidst the flames of martyrdom, which Bloody Mary
lighted, not one who did not give his life rather than accept a false doctrine concerning the communion. From Cranmer,
the primate and archbishop, down to the humblest peasant and artisan, the
English witnesses for Christ, were witnesses even unto death, against every
form of perverting the simplicity of the Lord's supper. (Blakeney's Hist.
Prayer Book, pp. 528, 529.)
It would be natural to conclude, that whatever error might find
place in the Church of England and her daughter in America, it would be
impossible that they should wander from the truth concerning the communion.
Here, surely, the principles for which Cranmer and Latimer, Ridley and Hooper
died, will be guarded as men guard their homes and the lives of their children.
But the weed of a false doctrine of the eucharist is one
which has tough roots, and readily sprouts again. From Reformation days there
were those in the English Church who shrank from the strong, clear views of
Cranmer, and his companions in martyrdom. They gained the ear of Elizabeth,
eager to reconcile her Popish subjects to a Protestant liturgy. They led her to
revise the communion service, so as to abolish a rubric denying the so-called
“real presence.” (Blakeney's Hist. Prayer Book, p. 449.) The same class of
religious teachers still further corrupted the service when the prayer book was
revised in the days of that worthless king, Charles II. (Proctor's Hist. Prayer
Book, chap. v.) The germs of a doctrine which the reformers died at the stake
rather than accept, were sown in' the soil of the service. They sprang up here
and there in the Church, but only reached their baleful harvest time when fifty
years ago the Oxford Tracts appeared. From that hour no Canada thistles ever
spread more rapidly. To-day, the doctrine of the “real presence” pervades our
mother Church, and is taught directly or indirectly by the vast majority of her
clergy. What is that doctrine? Briefly, it is that while there is no change of
substance in the bread and wine, Christ is spiritually present IN THEM after
the consecration. Mark the language. Every Protestant believes with Archbishop
Cranmer, that Christ is really present in the Lord's supper in the hearts of “all
them that worthily receive the same.” (Cranmer's Answer to Gardiner.) But the
advocates of the notion of the real presence, mean such presence in the bread and in the wine. The
officiating priest by consecration has imparted to the elements themselves the
spiritual presence of Jesus Christ. Do not think that I exaggerate. Listen to
this language from an accepted advocate of the doctrine: “The body and blood of
Christ are sacramentally united to the bread and wine, so that Cbrist is truly given
to the faithful.” “His flesh, together with the bread; and His blood, together
with the wine.” (Tracts for the Times, N. Y. Edition, 1839, Vol. 1, p. 199.) “The
nature of this mystery is such that when we receive the bread and wine, we also
together with them, receive the body and blood of Christ.” (Ibid, p. 214.) Dr.
Pusey declares in his letter to the Bishop of Oxford, “There is a true, real
and spiritual presence of Christ at the holy supper * * * * independently of
our faith.”
Dr. Pusey writes of the Lord's supper, “It is truly flesh
and blood, and these received into us cause that we are in Christ, and Christ
in us.”
Dr. Dix's Trinity Church Catechism says, “The bread and wine
become Christ's body and bloody yet remaining true bread and wine.” (p. 51).
Dr. James DeKoven writes, “Believing in the presence of the
body and blood of the Lord in the consecrated
elements, I believe that presence to be in no sense material or corporal,
but spiritual, though none the less real and true.” (Letter to certain
Wisconsin clergymen, 1874.)
In Pusey's “Eirenicon,” a work written to prove how slight
are the differences between the Church of
England and the Church of Rome, he refers to “Palmer on the Church,” as a book
“framed word for word on our formularies, which received the sanction of two
archbishops, and which used to be recommended to candidates for holy orders.” From
the work referred to he quotes these remarkable words: “She (the Church of
England) believes that the eucharist is not the sign of an absent body, and
that those who partake of it receive not merely the figure, or shadow, or sign
of an absent body, but the reality itself.
And as Christ's Divine and human natures are inseparably united, so she
believes that we receive in the eucharist, not only, the flesh and blood of
Christ, but Christ Himself, both God and man.” (Eirenicon, p. 31.)
Now, observe the exact idea which these quotations give. It
is that the real presence of Christ in the holy communion, is not a presence in
the hearts of believers. It is “independent of their faith.” But it is in the bread and in the wine. In one
word, the Spirit of God is placed, through a man's consecration of the
elements, in a piece of bread, and in a cup of wine! Is the Roman doctrine of
transubstantiation any more degrading to the Spirit of God than this? Or is it
strange that other perversions of the truth should have followed in its train?
If the consecrated bread and wine upon the Lord's table are
really the body and blood of Christ, then it logically follows that the table
ceases to be such. It has become an “altar,” on which is offered anew the body
and blood of Jesus as an oblation to the Father. “It is not,” says Dr. Dis, “a
sacrifice by way of a new death, but by way of a standing memorial of His
death. It pleads to the Eternal Father, sets forth before the world, and
applies to our souls the one sacrifice of Christ.”
Then, too, as we shall see in a later sermon of this course,
the minister becomes a sacrificing “priest,” who offers, like the sons of
Aaron, the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood. Hence it is that in the old
Church, the word “minister” has come to
be superseded by that of “priest.” We no longer hear of a faithful parish
minister, but a “parish priest.” Yet we have only to turn to the Epistle to the
Hebrews to learn that every trace of a sacrificing priesthood like that of
Aaron passed away when Jesus offered His “one sacrifice for sins forever,” and
“sat down at the right hand of God.” Christ is the only priest of the
Christian, except that every true believer, minister or layman, is one of “a
royal priesthood.”
But, above all, the whole system known as
"ritualism," by which the public worship of the Church once so dear
to us, has been completely disguised, is based on this false theory of the
Lord's supper. The vestments which have superseded the simple robes worn
formerly by ministers of the Protestant Episcopal Church, are imitations of
those which are supposed to have been worn by priests who offered sacrifices. A
leader of the Church of England ritualists, in answer to the question, “What
meaning do you attach to the vestments?” replied, “I take them to be a distinctive dress of a priest
at the time of celebrating the holy communion.” (Principles at Stake, p. 142.)
In the earlier days of the Church out of which our own
sprang, it was sometimes customary to bow the head at the name of Jesus in the
Creed, to signify belief in His Divinity. To-day, a far more profound obeisance
is made at multiplied points of the service, but — mark it well — always toward the table. Why? Because
that table is now “the altar,” with super-altar upon it, and crucifix crowning it.
And if this theory of the “real presence,'' and a sacrifice in the Lord's
supper, is true, they are right who bow. For, if the awful presence of the Son
of God is on that table, then, surely, I cannot prostrate myself in an
adoration too profound. But if it be an unscriptural and idolatrous doctrine,
then this bowing toward the so-called altar, is as offensive to God as
prostration before a Chinese image or an African gree-gree.
Back to the word of God the Reformed Episcopalian has gone.
Our Church has planted its feet upon the rock, in restoring the Lord's supper
to its primitive simplicity. Open your Book of Common Prayer, and in its
fore-front you find a “Declaration of Principles.” In the name of the Reformed
Episcopal Church, it condemns as “erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to
God's word,” the theory “that a Christian minister is a priest in any other
sense than that in which all believers are a royal priesthood; that the Lord's
table is an altar on which the oblation of the body and blood of Christ is
offered anew to the Father; and that the presence of Christ in the Lord's
supper is a presence in the elements of bread and wine.”
We framed our whole liturgy on the principles laid down in
this declaration. From cover to cover, you will nowhere find a minister of the
Gospel called a “priest.” We blotted out the dangerous expression which styled
the elements of bread and wine, “these holy mysteries.” We saw in them no
mysterious nature, but only simple and appropriate emblems. We went back to the
reformers of the Church of England, and found that Cranmer and his fellow-
martyrs had dropped out from the communion service, as it was first prepared, a
Romish prayer, entitled the “oblation.” The influence of the high church Bishop
Seabury had prevailed to have it inserted in the American prayer book. We
removed it once more, and restored the service for communion to the Protestant
form in which the reformers had bequeathed it. We required that the minister in
delivering the bread to the communicant, should call it “bread,” and when delivering
the cup should call it “wine” — that thus the Church should bear perpetual
witness to the fact that no change had taken place in these emblems through the
prayer of consecration.
We found that the Protestant Episcopal Church had omitted,
under the same inspiration of Bishop Seabury, the rubric of the Church of
England positively declaring that the consecration prayer does not change the
nature of the elements, and that no worship of those elements is intended by
kneeling at the communion. We put it back where Cranmer once had written it.
Then, to crown the work, we graved it upon the very constitution
of this Church, that no altar should ever be permitted in any edifice in which Reformed
Episcopalians should worship.
In an evil hour Archbishop Cranmer yielded to the Bloody
Mary's threats, and signed a paper recanting his own protest against the
doctrine of the real presence in the bread and wine of the communion. Bitterly
did he repent his cowardly act, and when the flames leaped up around him in the
hour of his martyrdom, he thrust his right hand, which had written his
recantation, into the hottest fire. “Unworthy hand! unworthy hand!” cried the
penitent martyr.
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